Viewing articles from 2016/10

In her first UK solo show, Aude Pariset critiques the systems that perpetuate human damage on the environment and floats potential solutions via home-manufactured bioplastics and living sculptures that evolve for the duration of the exhibition. Review by Jessie Bond

In light of European defence against immigrants, Halil Altındere proposes - at some ironic distance - to use the cosmic space as a haven for refugees. This vision of a life in space for the refugees is illustrated with specially designed spacesuits from a fictitious “Palmyra”-space mission, a planetary rover and a virtual reality video.

Kitty Clark presents an oculus rift virtual reality experience at the centre of a series of sculptures and projection works. Mr. Nobody, the central figure in the installation, suffers from Technostress, a term coined to describe the negative psychological relationship between people and new technologies.

A more illustrative title for this year's Brighton Photo Biennale - arguably UK's most important photography festival - could easily have been 'Identity, Portraiture, Self-Expression'. All three subjects are intertwined together in every BPB exhibition across the city as the representation of the body is approached through key themes, such as sexuality, gender, race and age. Review by Aris Kourkoumelis

The title of Piotr Lakomy’s exhibition at The Sunday Painter – ‘Room Temperature’ – prefaces the human body as both a starting point and remnant of its display. A ‘comfortable’ ambience of twenty degrees centigrade is at odds with the body’s thirty-seven, and it is this tension between comfort and discomfort, absence and presence, which lingers in the air. Review by Joseph Constable

This two-part show is sufficiently complex and self aware to acknowledge its complicity without being curtailed by it. The exhibition takes its name from Hito Steyerl’s performative lecture ‘Is the Museum a Battleground’, delivered at the 2009 Istanbul Biennial, in which Steyerl seeks to makes visible the ties which connect the art world to violent conflict via global capital. Review by Laura Purseglove

Entering the Curve through a pair of sand dunes and hustled into a small central corridor, a series of objects meet you – wigs and rocks, a tiny Games Workshop-esque model of the artist, a baseball jacket featuring a goat mascot who invites you to 'ruminate!' Tessa Norton reviews Bedwyr Williams' large scale work 'The Gulch' at the Barbican.

This autumn Seventeen presents ‘Lonesome Wife’, an imaginative and seductive exhibition displaying the work of nine multiform artists. Taking the focal point of being a show about text but without the text, curator Attilia Fattori Franchini edifies the character of William H. Gass’ (1968) novel ‘Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife’, by using installation, painting and photography. The unseen text is brought to gallery visitors through abstract, visual props that are as gentle and subtle as they are fetishistic and nasty. Review by Phoebe V. Bradford

‘Shave and a haircut - two bits’ is a new site specific installation by Czech artist Roman Štětina, on view from 21 October - 19 November, via a corridor between 7 and 8 High Street, as part of the city wide visual arts festival Cardiff Contemporary. Curated by Louise Hobson, this will be Štětina’s first exhibition in Wales.

The dense exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art provides an insightful overview of Nogueira’s practice between 1989 and 1997 and the space is packed with her sculptures, installations and drawings. Elli Resvanis reviews

Dean’s take on LA is jarring: instead of doubling down on the sinister shadows of the forests and canyons, she’s chosen the elements of the city that seem most antithetical to her gloomy aesthetic. Review by Liam Hess